Cafe Gabriela

Location Details

Pork is the best. Saturated fat content and various religious prohibitions aside, this fact is indisputable. Pork. Is. The. Best. Especially when it's done like it is at Cafe Gabriela, a sweet little lunch spot near 12th Street BART: marinated in adobo sauce, piled thick and moist on toasted Bread Workshop baguette, and covered with sweet caramelized onions, prepared by a polite and fastidious sandwich maestro in a clean, compact, sun-lit cafe. The meat itself is clearly the star of the show here, and it's damn near perfect: tender and not too chewy, not greasy in the slightest, and neither so copious you'll need to take a nap afterwards nor so insubstantial you'll be hungry again by four. If you're lucky, the bottom layer of bread'll soak through with the adobo sauce, making for a salty-sweet-spicy-briney riot of awesomeness. That is, if you can wait long enough.